Spalding’s World Tour

by Mark Lamster (Public Affairs; $26)

In the late nineteenth century, Albert Spalding, a sporting-goods magnate and former baseball star, decided to improve business by anointing himself ambassador for baseball and taking two teams of professional players on a six-month world tour. He brought along sideshow attractions, including an aerialist who hung on a trapeze from a hot-air balloon before the game, and he paid a prominent journalist to lend his support in print. Spalding’s success is debatable; spectators in Britain, for instance, were hard-pressed to follow the action and declared the game a knockoff of rounders. Spalding’s jaunt was an early example of the globalization of sports (the Olympics weren’t far behind), but Lamster’s history, while thorough and detailed, doesn’t substantively address what its reception might have suggested about overseas attitudes toward America’s burgeoning cultural clout.